Employee Privacy Notice

Introduction

North Tyneside Council (the Authority) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you during and after your working relationship with us.

It applies to all employees, former employees, workers and contractors.

North Tyneside Council is a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you.

This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions, so that you are aware of how and why we are using your personal information.

The Data Protection Principles

We will comply with data protection law. This says that the personal information we hold about you must be:

  1. Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
  2. Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
  3. Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
  4. Accurate and kept up to date.
  5. Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
  6. Kept securely.

How we collect your personal information

We collect personal information about employees, workers and contactors through the application and recruitment process, either directly from candidates or sometimes from an employment agency or background check provider.

We also collect additional information from third parties including former employers, and referees identified by the candidate.

We also collect additional personal information in the course of job-related activities throughout the period of you working for us.

Information we hold about you

We collect, store, and use the following types of personal information about you:

  • Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses.
  • Date of birth.
  • Sex.
  • Nationality.
  • Marital status.
  • Next of kin and emergency contact information.
  • Caring responsibilities.
  • National Insurance number.
  • Bank account details, payroll records and tax status information.
  • Salary, annual leave, pension and benefits information.
  • Start date, including previous employment start dates if it impacts on your length of service under the Local Government Modification Order.
  • Location of employment or workplace.
  • Copies of driving licence, MOT and car insurance information.
  • Recruitment information (including copies of right to work documentation, references and other information included in the application form or cover letter or as part of the application process).
  • Employment records (including job titles, work history, working hours, training records and professional memberships).
  • Salary history.
  • Performance information.
  • Disciplinary and grievance information.
  • CCTV footage, timesheets (flexi records) and other information obtained through electronic means such as your ID access card records.
  • Information about your use of our information and communications systems.
  • Photographs.
  • Secondary employment details including political interests (where appropriate).

We may also collect, store and use the following “special categories” of personal information:

  • Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political opinions.
  • Trade union membership.
  • Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records.
  • Genetic information and biometric data.
  • Information about criminal convictions, cautions, offences and court orders, and any criminal investigations about you.
  • Information about referrals to a professional body regarding your conduct or performance, or to the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).

How we use your personal information

The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below.

  • Making a decision about your recruitment or appointment.
  • Administering your contract of employment, worker agreement or contract for services.
  • Determining the terms on which you work for us.
  • Checking you are legally entitled to work in the UK and continue to be throughout your employment.
  • Paying you and, if you are an employee, deducting tax and National Insurance contributions.
  • Providing additional employee benefits to you if you choose to use them, for example:
    • Car leasing scheme
    • Childcare vouchers scheme
    • Cycle to work scheme
    • Travel ticket scheme
  • Liaising with your pension provider.
  • Business management and planning, including accounting and auditing.
  • Conducting performance reviews, managing performance and determining performance requirements.
  • Making decisions about salary reviews and pay and grading.
  • Assessing qualifications for a particular job or task, including decisions about promotions.
  • Gathering evidence for possible grievance or disciplinary hearings. This may include the use of CCTV footage.
  • Making decisions about your continued employment or engagement.
  • Carrying out risk assessments of your suitability to work with vulnerable groups
  • Making arrangements for the termination of our working relationship.
  • Education, training and development requirements.
  • Dealing with legal disputes involving you, or other employees, workers and contractors, including accidents at work.
  • Ascertaining your fitness to work.
  • Managing sickness absence.
  • Complying with health and safety obligations.
  • To prevent and detect fraud. (Further information can be found in Council Finances).
  • To monitor your use of our information and communication systems to ensure compliance with our IT policies.
  • To ensure network and information security, including preventing unauthorised access to our computer and electronic communications systems and preventing malicious software distribution.
  • To conduct data analytics studies to review and better understand employee retention and attrition rates.
  • To review workforce data to help target development opportunities for our workforce as a means of up skilling/enhancing career development.
  • Equal opportunities monitoring.
  • Contacting next of kin and arranging medical attention in connection with illness, injury or death of an employee in the workplace.
  • To evaluate potential conflicts of interest such as secondary employment and political interests (where appropriate).
  • Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.

Failing to provide your personal information

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract you have entered into with the Authority (such as paying you or providing a benefit), or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as to ensure the health and safety of our workers).

Do we need your consent?

We don’t need your consent to use special categories of your personal information if this is in order to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights in the field of employment law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain sensitive data, for example ethnicity. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent. You should be aware that it is not a condition of your contract with us that you agree to any request for consent from us.

Criminal Convictions

We will only collect information about criminal convictions, cautions, offences and criminal investigations if it is proportionate, appropriate and where we are legally able to do so. Where appropriate, we will collect information about these as part of the recruitment process, during regular safeguarding check processes, or we may be notified of such information directly by either you, or others, in the course of you working for us.

We will use information about criminal convictions, cautions, offences and criminal investigations in the following ways:

  • To assess your suitability to work for the authority.
  • To assess the suitability of an individual to work in certain positions of trust, including work with children and vulnerable adults, and in certain positions where the highest standards of professional performance are required such as roles in licensing and regulatory functions. We are allowed to use your personal information in this way to comply with legislation such as the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006.

Information Sharing

We will share your personal information with third parties where the law allows us to or where it is necessary to administer your employment contract.

The Authority outsources a number of functions to third-party service providers which means the following services are delivered by third-party providers: payroll, pension administration, benefits provision and administration, IT services.

All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions. Further information can be found in Council Finances.

We may share your personal information with other third parties, for example if we are entering into outsourcing arrangements with third parties. You will be informed of this before any data is shared.

We may also share your personal information with Trade Unions for example, as part of collective bargaining or  where there is a legal requirement to do so. In other circumstances we will share anonymised information. Further information on this can be found in the Authority’s Industrial Relations Framework.

Periodically we will undertake a staff survey to gather your views on working at the Authority.  We will provide contact details to a third-party research company to gather these views on our behalf including your work address.

Data Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

Further information of these measures may be obtained from the Authority’s Information Security Policy.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

Retention

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available on the intranet.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.

Your Rights

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us
Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

  • Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
  • Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
  • Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
  • Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on consent and you object to processing.
  • Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
  • Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the Information Governance team in writing.

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

There may be times where we may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights).

Data Protection Officer

The Data Protection Officer (DPO) oversees compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the DPO.

Wendy Rochester
Data Protection Officer
Wendy.Rochester@northtyneside.gov.uk
(0191) 643 5620

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

The ICO can be contacted at the following address:

Information Commissioner’s Officer
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK0 5AF

Changes to this Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

For further information about this Privacy Notice please contact your line manager or HR.